Every day, over 12 million people wander around applying at new places looking for a job. Just two years ago, the unemployment rate was at 9.2%, and has since edged down to 7.8%. This is still a major problem that Obama said he would fix. Personally, I’m sick of seeing homeless people when I walk down the streets and constantly being asked for money. If you want to know the seriousness of this problem, and how to fix it, then let me explain it to you.

Like I said earlier, the unemployment rate is at 7.8%, which averages out to over 12 million people. These people vary from young adults right out of college to people in there 50s or 60s. People working now-a-days hang on to their jobs for their life because of how many people need a job and send in applications to take their place. Businesses are always looking for new staff and people who will do the job better, and once they find a new worker, the old one gets the boot. This is a problem because the retirement age keeps getting raised. This means that people have to keep working at an older age and it keeps the jobs occupied and no new openings for new workers who desperately need a job. The retirement age has been raised from 60, to 65, even reaching 70 in some places. How is the unemployment rate supposed to lower when people are literally working until they can’t anymore? Instead of letting people retire comfortably at 60, they are forced to work day to day until up to 70. People coming out of college have no jobs because of this. Say you go into college to become a teacher, you take the courses for 4 years, top of the class, and you have a great personality, but once you graduate there are no schools hiring because all their classrooms are filled with older aged teachers. Now i'm not saying having an older teacher is a bad thing, but this student went to college and studied to become a teacher, but because teachers cant retire until they are 60, and some even work until they are 65. If all teachers retired 60, then there would be more job openings. That is only one of the hundreds of job examples that have this problem.

After doing some research, I have come up with at least five really good reasons why our unemployment rate is as high as it is today. The first reason I came up with is there are such little job openings, it is hard to keep up with the growing population we have in this day and age. The number of new job openings in the country crashed to below 3 million jobs whereas there used to be 4.5 million new openings before it. This is a huge downfall because there are way too many people without jobs to have the number of new job openings crash as bad as it has. The second reason I have come up with is that there is a lack of real growth in the economy. A measly 36,000 jobs were recently added, where we would need at least 150,000 new job openings to keep up with the rising population. Next up, we have the government laying off their staff. Government sector jobs, which are considered the safest, are becoming a dangerous option as state and local governments are continually cutting jobs. The government has tens of millions of workers, and they are in no place to be cutting jobs. My next reason is how China is taking away our jobs in handfuls. Cost advantages in China, thanks to its low labor costs, are moving thousands of jobs into China and away from the United States each year. Plus, the trade deficit is slowly eating up the U.S. economy as hundreds of billions of dollars are going to the rest of the world. My fifth and final reason is that the taxes are simply too high. Thanks to this, it is literally causing businesses to be pushed out of the United States, causing jobs to vanish. Businesses in the United States pay more taxes that anywhere else in the world. You wonder why our unemployment rate is so high? Take a look at all these reasons and you’ll finally understand how deep of a whole America is in.